]]>Jason Hoffman has never been short on opinions. He wasn’t as the co-founder and CTO of cloud computing provider Joyent, he wasn’t as a fixture at our numerous Structure conferences over the years (by the way, Structure Data is coming up in March), and he isn’t in his new role as vice president of corporate strategy and portfolio management at Ericsson.

He proved the latter during an appearance on our Structure Show podcast this week, discussing everything from the cloud market he used to live and breathe to the connected car market his currently employer is doggedly pursuing. It was one of the most fun interviews we’ve done and possibly the most fun I’ve ever had talking cloud computing. Here are the highlights, but you’ll probably want to listen to the whole thing, which also features a great breakdown of the state of mobile networking.

What Amazon Web Services does right

“Hats off to AWS, still,” Hoffman said. “It just really, really goes to show that … [paraphrasing ex-Google engineer Steve Yegge] a product will always be replaced by an equivalent or lesser product that’s platformized.”

AWS knows what people want, it’s able to iterate quickly and, most importantly, it’s accessible. “I continue to expect AWS to just really take that … retail and buying experience type capability and proceed to just rip into all the traditional IT players and do pretty well,” Hoffman said.

However, if understanding platforms, users and business were all it took to be the top cloud provider, Microsoft might very well be in that same spot. “The basic difference between Microsoft and Amazon internally that I don’t think a lot of people appreciate is Amazon … really has turned themselves into one platform used internally and externally,” Hoffman explained. “… Microsoft internally, like Google internally, is a bunch of islands.”

What Google needs to do

Said Hoffman:

“What Google needs to basically do is sit down and say, ‘One, this is going to be a permanent line of business for us and is not going away,’ which Amazon has been very vocal about saying. The second thing they gotta do is they have to say, ‘Not only is it not going away, we are planning for it to be as large a line of business for us as our advertising business.’ … Number three, that ‘We’re willing to contractually do the things that need to be de done to sort of get the trust of large customers.'”

Oh, and spend tens of millions of dollars over the next few years to ensure it becomes a leader in the space.

Asked whether he thinks it will actually do these things, especially pledging to make cloud as big as advertising, Hoffman joked, “Well, I don’t know. I’m just telling you what they should say.”

Jason Hoffman at Structure 2013. (c) Pinar Ozger pinarozger.com

Why OpenStack might be a lost cause

“The big challenge around OpenStack stuff is that everyone that’s there talking, talking, talking, talking, talking — none of them has ever run infrastructure. So they have no idea what they’re talking about,” he said. “And there’s a few vocal people that do and have done stuff, and they’re just not able to push things through that entire process as rapidly as they should.”

What’s wrong with the process, Hoffman continued, is this: “You have a process that’s like governance, governance, governance, governance, governance. Run VMs, run VMs, run VMs. And what the process needs to be about it accessibility, accessibility, accessibility, accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. Platform features, platform features, platform features, platform features.”

Until someone contributes the pieces of the stack that OpenStack needs to become a real platform, Hoffman doesn’t see it amounting to more than the Unix-based Common Desktop Environment did as a Windows alternative in the 1990s. “It just isn’t gonna happen,” he said.

What ‘cloud’ means to carriers

“Just like a lot of the internet-facing and webscale companies had to come up with a mobile strategy, on the mobile equipment manufacturers side and even the mobile carrier side, we’re now having to come up with what’s called a digital strategy.”

At Ericsson, that entails everything from managing consumer content to dealing with an internet mostly populated by machines to figuring out how cloud computing will affect the company’s own IT strategy.

“It’s somewhat different in that a lot of the cloud conversation that’s been existing within Ericsson to date has largely been around how does one actually virtualize and then make more accessible really the core of carrier networks, so it’s not even meant to be a public cloud service or even to be consumed by enterprise IT users or anything like that,” Hoffman said. “… The conversation to date has been more around, from the radio access network all the way up to the core network, how does that become more ‘cloudy.'”

The most-important challenges for connected cars

Hoffman, who was at CES this week, also shared some of his thoughts from the show and current efforts to connect everything from baseball stadiums to cars. One of the big challenges to all this connectivity is keeping everything that needs to be online online. “[Y]ou can’t, for example, all of a sudden be driving by AT&T Park and everyone’s tweeting and Instagramming during the game and your car stops working,” Hoffman said.

Carriers or car manufacturers also need to figure out a business model that works for consuming all that data. “You’re not gonna go … ‘OK, it’s $800 a month for your car to be connected.’ No, no thanks,” Hoffman joked. “I really need one that’s gonna go on working during a zombie attack.”

]]>Apple was able to pull off an engineering feat in its latest batch of iPads it hasn’t been able to accomplish for a long time: It has designed a single cellular version of both the iPad Air and new iPad Mini that will work on carrier networks across the globe.

In the past, Apple has been forced to make multiple versions of any cellular-connected device in order to capture the many differences in frequencies and technologies across the globe – the iPhone 5s and 5c each have four hardware variants, each with their own unique combination of LTE bands.

But Apple decided to put its foot down with this latest batch of iPads. They won’t be able to connect to as many networks in as many countries as the iPhone line, but the two iPads each sport an impressive 14 bands. They’ll work across all major North American and European carriers as well as link to many networks in Asia and the Middle East.

The most obvious beneficiary here in the U.S. is T-Mobile. Apple is supporting its LTE network for the first time in the iPad (though previous versions did work on the Advanced Wireless Service band T-Mo uses), and T-Mo is taking advantage of the situation by applying some interesting pricing models to the device. T-Mobile is luring customers in with a 200 MB a month free plan, similar to the promotions it’s running on connected laptops. Its first paid plans start at $30 a month for 2.5 GB.

Still Apple had to make some sacrifices. There’s no support for Time-Division LTE, the version of the LTE standard used by Sprint, China Mobile, Softbank Mobile, and many operators across Asia and the Middle East. Still, it’s not as important to Apple to support every LTE network on the iPad. Due to the cost of mobile data, the iPad is still primarily a Wi-Fi-first device. Consequently Apple sells a lot more Wi-Fi-only iPads.

]]>Guavus, a San Mateo, Calif.-based startup that specializes in analyzing the data coming off carrier networks, has hired former NetApp EVP Manish Goel as CEO. Goel replaces Anukool Lakhina, who founded the company and will stay on board to help drive its technology strategy, among other things. Guavus has raised $87 million in capital and claims some major wireless carriers as customers of its software that helps tie customer data to network activity.

]]>Nexmo already handles the international SMS and push messaging for companies like AirBnB and Viber, but now it wants to expand its horizons. It’s launching new application programming interfaces (APIs) that connect to other mobile carrier services. To accomplish that it’s raised $3 million from Intel Capital, NHN Investment Corporation and Initial Capital.

At first glance Nexmo isn’t exactly what you’d think of as a next-generation technology company. It traffics in old-school telecom signaling protocols like SS7, but in doing so it’s able to link the app-centric world of IP communications with mobile networks — no matter how old — around the world. Like its competitor Twilio, Nexmo can give developers access to services like SMS that would normally be locked inside carriers’ labyrinth networks, and through its network of relationships with the carriers it can streamline the transaction process.

Based jointly in San Francisco and London, Nexmo says its current SMS API can reach 5 billion mobile devices or connections around the world. That’s only about 900 million short of the total number of non-machine-to-machine subscriptions in the world, according to the GSM Association.

The company said its next step is to expand its catalog of telco APIs, but it didn’t give any specific examples. You can bet that VoIP is probably in the mix though. Being able to establish an in-app VoIP call that can connect to any mobile phone number in the world would be a very attractive service to customers like AirBnB.

Correction: An earlier version of this post said Zendesk was an SMS customer of Nexmo. Though Zendesk is listed on Nexmo’s website as a customer, it uses Twilio for its SMS and push messaging services. Nexmo, however, has integrated its service with the Zendesk platform even though it has no direct business relationship with the company.